February 6th, 2013 Kevin Mason, a commenter on the Guardian website, had this to say about the £390 million settlement that Royal Bank of Scotland reached with the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, US Department of Justice and Financial Services Authority over rampant Libor-rigging today [Mason’s words sourced from Graeme Wearden’s excellent Libor rigging live blog published […]

January 24th, 2013 This is the first interview that Chicago lawyer Anton Valukas has given since the publication of his 2,292 page report into the bankrutpcy of Lehman Brothers on March 11th, 2010. At that time, Valukas found strong evidence of financial and accounting fraud designed to deceive investors at the defunct New York-based investment […]

October 19th, 2012 This is an edited transcript of a phone interview with Michael Hudson by Dimitris Yannopoulos for Athens News. It summarizes some of the major themes of Hudson’s new book, The Bubble and Beyond: Fictitious Capital, Debt Deflation and Global Crisis, published in the UK in July 2012. Q: How has the financial system evolved into […]

October 18th, 2012 By Rowan Bosworth-Davies “Go where you will, in business parts, or meet who you like of businessmen, it is – and has been for the last three years – the same story and the same lament. Dishonesty, untruth, and what may, in plain English, be termed mercantile swindling within the limits of […]

October 18th, 2012 By Tom Nicol ‘Then the flying machines started falling from the sky.’ Once upon a time in the Westerlands, people became aware of a developing phenomenon: flying machines were falling from the sky with a great deal more regularity than was previously the case. Understandably, the people became uneasy and started to […]

September 28th, 2012 (updated Sept 29th, 2012) In the days after the Libor scandal erupted with the Barclays settlement of June 27th, there was little doubt about it. Banks including Barclays had been systematically engaged in the rigging, and attempts to rig, the Libor interbank rates as well as other aspects of the financial markets […]

September 14th, 2012 Kweku Adoboli, a former UBS’s trader, was a ‘rogue’ who fraudulently gambled away the bank’s money, “cooked the books”, doctored documents, faked profits, fabricated clients and lied to his bosses to boost his earnings power, according to an opening statement from prosecutor Sasha Wass QC in Southwark Crown Court today. Wass, of 6 […]

By Ian Fraser Published: Sunday Herald Date: August 12th, 2012 STANDARD Chartered, the London-headquartered bank that does most of its business in Asia, was – until the beginning of last week – the last good bank standing. It was one of the select band of banks to characterise themselves as a cut above the rest, having […]

August 1st, 2012 (minor revisions September 4th 2012) by Rowan Bosworth-Davies The most prestigious names in the British banking and finance routinely engage in criminal activities on a scale that would make any Mafia family proud. Whether it’s by facilitating international money-laundering; manipulating markets through Libor rigging; institutionalised insider dealing; misappropriating money from clients’ pension savings […]

July 18th, 2012 Image by WilliamBanzai7 A friend who works for for Barclays told me what the culture is now like at such banks these days. In response to a question about how bankers have changed — in terms of culture, motivations, behaviour — over the past two decades, he said: “I have the advantage […]